ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS RESOURCES

A STUDY OF NIGHT AND THE HOLOCAUST

Description

In my classes, we start our Holocaust unit with a KWL (Know-Want to Know-Learn) chart. I write what my students Know and Want to Know on the board, type it, and give each student a copy for their notes. Typing the chart isn't really necessary, but I find it saves time when we get ready to fill in the "Learn" column (and we do this a lot) if I can hold something uniform up and say "get this out."

Figuring out my students' prior knowledge and interests related to the Holocaust keeps me from repeating things students have already learned in the eighth grade and ensures student ownership of the unit. Some of my students' questions (what they "Want to Know") about the Holocaust are unique, but a lot of the things they're curious about are fairly representative of tenth-graders in North Carolina:

• What does it mean to be a Jew?
• Why did the Nazis persecute the Jews?
• Why didn't they fight back?
• Who else did the Nazis persecute?
• Where were the concentration camps located?
• Who was Hitler? What did he want?
• How did people let it happen?
• How many people were killed?
• What was it like to live in a concentration camp?
• What happened to the people who did this?

This would be a great unit to work with a Social Studies teacher on, because some of the students' history-related questions could be covered in that class. If that's not possible, covering some of the history involved is definitely worthwhile and can be done pretty easily with an internet scavenger hunt or any of the myriad other resources available.

I think that a flexible approach works well for a study of the Holocaust because there is so much information on the subject, and more produced every day. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum publishes Teaching about the Holocaust: A Resource Book for Educators, which has an annotated bibliography and videography, history, chronology, and guidelines for teaching about the Holocaust. It's available for free in PDF format on their website (http://www.ushmm.org/education/foreducators/). They also have booklets about other minority group victims of the Holocaust, survivor stories, information about resistance during the Holocaust, photographs, and a special web site for students. Other web sites that may be helpful:

• The Holocaust History Project (http://www.holocaust-history.org/)
• A Cybrary of the Holocaust (http://remember.org/)
• The Museum of Tolerance / Simon Wiesenthal Center (http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/)
• A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust (http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/)

There have also been a number of films and made-for-television movies in recent years that deal with the Holocaust, as well as some excellent documentaries:

• Conspiracy (HBO) - stars Kenneth Branagh, deals with the planning of the "Final Solution"
• Nuremberg (TNT) - stars Alec Baldwin, deals with the Nuremberg Trials
• Uprising (NBC) - deals with Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto
• Life is Beautiful - Oscar-Winner, works well with Night
• Schindler's List - depicts the horror of the concentration camps and details the rescue of Jews by Oskar Schindler
• Holocaust & Yad Vashem - two-video-set that covers the rise in anti-Semitism from WWI to the concentration camps
• Sorrow: the Nazi Legacy (Facets Multimedia) - Swedish teenagers visit Auschwitz and meet survivors and the son of the Nazi administrator of Poland

I also like to use children's picture books to explore some of the issues in our Holocaust Unit. For example, we use Dr. Seuss' Yertle the Turtle when we discuss Hitler and Roberto Innocenti's Rose Blanche to introduce the White Rose resistance movement. Some other children's books that might be helpful:

• The Terrible Things - Eve Bunting
• The Lily Cupboard - Shulamith Levey Oppenheim
• Let the Celebrations Begin! - Margaret Wild
• Star of Fear, Star of Hope - Jo Hoestlandt
• The Butterfly - Patricia Polacco
• Flowers on the Wall - Miriam Nerlove
• The Number on my Grandfather's Arm - David Adler
• Hilde and Eli: Children of the Holocaust - David Adler
• One Yellow Daffodil - David Adler
• Passage to Freedom: the Sugihara Story - Ken Mochizuki

Ken Mochizuki has also written several picture books about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. I find that it's useful to hold myself to two or three picture books in this unit. High school students tend to look at picture books as somewhat juvenile, especially when bombarded with them, and that's not the impression of the Holocaust I want to give them.

Most of the activities included in this unit are flexible, and I've included the shortest version covering each topic in our Holocaust study. For example, the Holocaust Scavenger Hunt can be replaced with a more extended research project in which students work in groups to produce a PowerPoint presentation or short film using the information from the USHMM's "The Holocaust: A Learning Site for Students." I'd love to have the time to expand our study of Resistance to allow for a similar research project and student presentations about each of the resisting groups, and it would be wonderful to be able to show Uprising. The thing I like most about this unit is that there are plenty of opportunities for expansion, and I add something new every year.

The only thing I'm not very flexible about in this unit is its centerpiece, Elie Wiesel's Night. It answers several of my students' big questions about the Holocaust (what does it mean to be a Jew? What was it like to live in a concentration camp? Why didn't they fight back?), and it appeals to students because it speaks in a voice they can relate to as adolescents. I've developed a WebQuest for Night that can be used a variety of ways: as a series of on-line centers, as activities before, during, and after our reading, or as several options for a single project. I'm a stickler for requiring students to read outside of class, but I usually try to give them a reading day at the beginning of a novel (or memoir, in this case) to get hooked. With Night, I read Thomas Thorton's poem "On Wiesel's Night" aloud to students before I pass out copies of the memoir, and we spend the rest of that period reading. I also have a Book-on-Tape version of Night, which I lend out to some of my students who have difficulties with reading comprehension, but I also send a letter to their parents explaining that the tapes are for reading along. Students have to bring back the bottom half of the letter signed before they get the tapes. I'm a big believer in borrowing ideas from other teachers: Nan Massengill and Peter Bobbe were kind enough to share the activity plans for Text Rendering and Juliek's Violin, respectfully.

I find this unit works best when it follows our study of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. In exploring the Treaty of Versailles and Germany's resentment at the end of WWI, students can see the progression towards the identification and persecution of national scapegoats, the cause of the Holocaust. I haven't been brave enough to try three depressing books in a row yet, but I'd eventually like to try to follow this unit with a study of Alexander Solzhenytsin's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, to explore the links between Nazi concentration camps and Stalin's gulags.

Jennifer Smyth, Tyrrell County

<< Back | Table of Contents | Next >>